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Afenifere spokesman, Yinka Odumakin |
Thank God I told Professor Yadudu on the floor of the 2014 National Conference that we are bogged down with all the lacunas in the Constitution he prepared for the late General Sani Abacha. I saw my friend and brother, Comrade Dan Nwayanwu, walking to his seat as I made the point. He later told me he went to tease the Law Professor “You see people know about this thing.”
When I tried to check Abacha’s educational background, this is all I could get. “A Kanuri from Borno, Abacha was born and brought up in Kano, Nigeria. He attended the Nigerian Military Training College and Mons Officer Cadet School before being commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant in 1963”.
Our Constitution was therefore tailored to make him eligible for self-succession before he expired in June 1998 and the Yadudu draft was picked from under his pillow for Nigeria to continue its leadership disaster. Niki Tobi Committee empanelled to look at the draft had only 155 days to peruse it.
Mr Eric Teniola who worked at the Presidency in 1999 has revealed that as of the time our President and Governors were sworn in at the beginning of this dispensation, there was no clean copy of the Constitution as it was still under print at Heritage Press in Abuja!
The Appeal Court Panel that ruled on Atiku vs Buhari last Wednesday could have been annoyingly inelegant and overreaching in its presentation of its judgment, as there are those who hold that even if the defendants were to write the judgment in their own case, they would have put it in a nicer form. The cold fact, however, is that we have a Constitution that should not be the basis of governing decent and civilised people in the modern era.
They never bothered to check the interpretation clause to decipher what Professor Yadudu and co meant by “equivalent.”Here is it:
“School certificate or its equivalent” means:
(b) education up to Secondary School Certificate level; or
(c) Primary Six School Leaving Certificate or its equivalent and –
(i) service in the public or private sector in the Federation in any capacity acceptable to the Independent National Electoral Commission for a minimum of ten years, and
(iii) the ability to read, write, understand and communicate in the English language to the satisfaction of the Independent National Electoral Commission, and
(d) any other qualification acceptable by the Independent National Electoral Commission;”
The eighth wonder of the world would have been if any society that accepted this type of document to be the instrument of its governance had made it.
The electoral body is at liberty to even accept a “qualification” according to its whims and caprices. If a candidate presents a “certificate “ from Tramadoll Academy in Sambisa Forest and INEC is satisfied with it, eligibility is assured.
The Presidential Election Tribunal should have interpreted the law as it is to do their job without behaving like the proverbial overzealous labourer who does more than a day’s work for a day’s pay; by going into all the legal somersaults of an affidavit being an article of faith and all the rest.
Discerning Nigerians should know by now that this country is going nowhere except we shred this Constitution and put an autochthonous one in its place.